Zhu De

Zhu De (1 December 1886-6 July 1976) was one of the Ten Marshals of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of the People's Republic of China, and was one of Mao Zedong's inner circle. He is credited with the creation of the PLA, and was one of the pioneers of the Chinese Communist Party.

Biography
Zhu De was born on 1 December 1886 in Yilong County, Sichuan, in the Qing Dynasty (present-day China). He assisted Cai E in unseating Yuan Shikai as the dictator of the Republic of China, and he became a warlord. In 1920 his troops were driven from Sichuan towards the Tibet border, but he returned to Yunnan as a public security commissioner. When his wife and child were murdered by rivals in 1922, he fell into a short period of opium addiction, and decided to study abroad in Europe. From 1922 to 1925 he was at Gottingen University in Germany, where he met fellow Chinese figure Zhou Enlai. He joined the Chinese Communist Party and was expelled from Gottingen due to his involvement in student protests, and in July 1926 he returned to China after a year in the Soviet Union.

Zhu De was made a leader of the First United Front, an alliance of the communists and Kuomintang nationalists that opposed lawless warlords in the country.